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The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins

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When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms an apparently crazed gunman chasing two frightened homeless men along a deserted causeway at night, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind. Within hours, Lucy becomes a hero. Her celebrity is short-lived, though: the 'crazed gunman', Sean McCandless, turns out to be a victim of child sexual abuse and the two men are serial paedophiles.

The solitary eye-witness, the depressed and overweight Lena Sørensen, thrilled by Lucy's heroism and decisiveness, becomes obsessed with the trainer and enrols as a client at her Bodysculpt gym. It quickly becomes clear that Lena is more interested in Lucy's body than her own. Then, when one of the paedophiles she allowed to escape carries out a heinous sex attack, Lucy's transition from hero to villain is complete. When Lucy imprisons Lena in her mother's deserted real-estate blocks downtown, and can't stop thinking about The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, the real problems start...

In the aggressive, drill-sergeant trainer, Lucy Brennan, and the needy, manipulative Lena Sørensen, Irvine Welsh has created two of his most memorable female protagonists, and one of the most bizarre, sado-masochistic folie à deux in contemporary fiction. The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins taps into two great obsessions of our time, personal training regimes and real estate – how we look and where we live – and tells a story so subversive and dark it blacks out the Florida sun.